It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  He was too young to have been taken from his mother and I prepared the children for the worst. Or the best, as it would have turned out. We suckled him on goat’s milk and egg yolk. He thrived. He opened his eyes and began to toddle around on rubbery legs. He grew tiny teeth and exercised them on our fingers and toes like a sweet little baby piranha.

  He lay in wait behind the door and with a growl leaped out and savaged us. This was no little kitten chasing after a paper ball – he drew blood. We learned to wear proper shoes and long trousers in his company, which was an inconvenience in hot weather. He went through the children’s toys like a shredder and could scatter the insides of a cushion round the room faster than you or I could plump it. Oddly enough, he never molested the white wool flokati rugs.

  From the size of his feet I should have been prepared for how big our sweet little puppy would grow. But not how ugly. It was like the ugly duckling in reverse. His head grew long and thin, with close-set eyes. He carried it low as though he felt continually in disgrace, which he was. His ears were ragged and lop-sided and covered with ticks. His hair grew coarse and wiry. It was like stroking a nylon brush. His body broadened out from narrow shoulders to bony haunches and his hind legs were longer than the front, so he walked with a permanent skulk. His tail was pointed and whippy and curled over his back like a scorpion’s to flaunt a puckered grey bum-hole in a nest of clingers and a glimpse of dangling marrons glacés. When the children dressed him in baby clothes he looked like Red Riding Hood’s wolf in grandma’s clothes.

  He soon grew out of a collar and lead. I bought a choke chain, not that it did much good. He had a galvanised windpipe. I fashioned a three-handled leash so that the children could take him for walks. If fewer than three of them took him, they were dragged in the dust like Greeks behind his namesake’s chariot. Although I could manage him, I only took him out at night so we would not be seen together.

  Training was a challenge. He treated ‘Sit’ with contempt and ‘Heel’ as a target. Chastisement was even more difficult. He growled back at verbal reprimands, snapped at the hand that tapped his nose and tore to bits the rolled-up newspaper. He recognised Arfa’s status as pack leader, but his relationship with the rest of the litter was more rough than tumble as he jostled for seniority in the snapping order.

  ‘Daaad, Hector bit me again.’

  ‘That’s not a bite, sweetheart, there’s no blood. That’s his way of being friendly.’ This was a big mistake, as it set a precedent.

  ‘Maam, Harry bit me.’

  ‘I was only being friendly.’

  Ugly, vicious and uncooperative, Hector was the antithesis of the family pet in all but one respect: defending our territory. Like most of the houses in the neighbourhood we had a ‘Beware of the Dog’ sign on the gatepost, but in our case it was no bluff. One glimpse of Hector and you had second thoughts about coming in on aesthetic grounds alone. Gardeners, tradesmen, postmen and our friends waited for the all-clear before setting foot inside. Not that their bottoms were safe even then. Foiled by the chain link fence, the dog lurked in the bushes by the gate and as soon as it was open a crack he was through. Local lads soon realised that I was a soft touch for trousers. Hardly a week went by without a stranger at the gate holding a torn pair, Sunday best usually and probably caught on a nail.

  Our Greek friends advised us to chain him up like their dogs, but one of the many sources of British superciliousness towards Greeks was how badly they treated their animals and look how they keep their dogs chained up all day. So we let him roam free in the garden.

  Hector was a great hunter. He practised his skills on balls, skipping ropes, toy planes, Frisbees and visiting children. He should have been a British dog of the kind that are encouraged to savage foxes and stags and badgers and hares, to the disgust of foreigners, but he had to make do with less sporting prey. He kept the garden free of living things, including cocky crows and pigeons that were rash enough to land on his lawn. They flapped away insolently when Hector bolted from the bushes, but they reckoned without his speed. He could jump six feet and catch them on the wing in a squawk and a flurry of feathers. When he had caught them he had no interest in finishing the job, however. It was the catching not the killing that drove him. Once they were disabled with broken backs or a wing torn off, he left them to writhe and flop on the terrace.

  When he got out of the garden he came back with exotic victims, a snake or a rabbit or more usually one of the neighbours’ chickens. It was my job to finish them off and stick them in a garbage bag before the owners traced them.

  ‘Must you use the children’s cricket bat?’

  ‘They haven’t got a baseball bat.’

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘You think I enjoy it? I think I’m whacking the wrong animal.’

  ‘You brought him home.’

  All our discussions about Hector ended with this damning phrase. He was my problem, but I was too cowardly to face up to the responsibility. Every time he got out I was afraid that he would be run over or shot by a chicken owner or poisoned by meat laced with strychnine, which is the Athenian method of dealing with strays, a fear that was also a hope. Just as we took the children to play with friends who had chickenpox, I took Hector to visit dogs infected with calazar, an incurable wasting disease that makes them weak but docile.

  Finally, I had a golden opportunity. The occasion was a sunny afternoon in March. Hector had escaped that morning and we were enjoying the opportunity of a game of French cricket without him running off with the ball or yapping and scratching at the door of the basement, where we locked him in. The first few times he ran away we scoured the neighbourhood to find him, but even if we spotted him he never came when we called and was impossible to catch. He returned in his own good time.

  But he had never come back like he did that day. My first thought was that he had been discharged from orthopaedics. The lower half of his body and his legs were encased in plaster. He limped one foot at a time, each step obviously agony. His whippy tail was tucked between his legs and his head hung as low as the plaster would let it.

  ‘Maam, Hector’s been turned to stone,’ shouted Harry, whose current bedtime reading was Medusa with her boar tusks and head of writhing snakes. She turned to stone anyone who looked at her and was a change from the Mister Men.

  After the initial shock, we deduced what had happened. An essential ingredient of Greek life is asvesti, slaked lime. It looks like plaster of Paris. You dilute it with water into the milky whitewash that makes island houses such a brilliant white. It is a disinfectant and stings the tiny feet of flies, so you use it on the walls, floors and ceilings of the kitchen and the toilet. You paint steps and thresholds so that people can see them in the dark. You paint it on tree trunks to stop insects climbing up and motorists crashing into them. You decorate the pavement so that it looks nice. Diluted to the consistency of thick cream, you add it to mortar to make it sticky and to rendering so that it clings to vertical surfaces.

  Hector must have been in hot pursuit through a building site and waded into a bath of asvesti. It bonded with his bristly hair like fibreglass. A Plimsoll line ran neatly round his body from just under his tail to just under his neck. Above it was Hector. Below it was the petrified dog found in the ashes of Pompeii.

  In addition to the incapacity, it must have been really painful. I knew from personal experience that asvesti stings and shrivels the skin. We tried washing it off, chipping it with a hammer and tugging at little bits with pliers, but dogs are intolerant of body waxing and in any case it would have taken us days. Much as I resented the expense, I loaded Hector into the camper and took him to the vet.

  Monika Papadopoulos was from Stuttgart and had a thriving practice attending to the pedigree pets of the smart set. Nevertheless, she swallowed her pride and laid our dog down on her operating table. She selected a syringe, pushed the needle under the skin of his shoulder and emptied half the vial. Hector drifted off into a deep and peaceful sleep. I
took a long breath and with a lump in my throat suggested to Monika that she put him out of his misery for good. In my daydreams she pushes the plunger the rest of the way. Good night sweet prince and flights of doggy angels sing thee to thy rest …

  ‘Vy? He is a helsy animal.’

  I didn’t have the courage to pursue it. She got busy with scissors and a packet of Bic razors. It took her an hour. She larded Hector with foul-smelling ointment and I carried him out to the camper, still dozy. His family welcomed him home with disappointment and horror.

  When he staggered to his feet he was truly grotesque. Below the Plimsoll line his greasy skin was grey and raw and blotchy and scarred, like the slimy black skin of a steamed Dover sole, as repulsive to the touch as to the eye. Without hair his legs were long and knobbly, his belly sagged and his tail was clenched so hard between his legs that he limped. He had been ugly enough to start with, but now he looked like a mutant specially bred to frighten little children. Visitors blenched at the sight of him.

  In the days that followed he slunk around, cowed and resentful, looking for places to slump and slurp his tender privates. We banned him from the terrace and anywhere else we ate or drank, for no better reason than that he put us off our food.

  One evening I was sitting with my feet on the balcony rails enjoying the sunset over Mount Parnis. The children were hiding somewhere from bathtime and I was enjoying the tranquillity. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hector slink like Gollum up the steps from the garden. I didn’t have the strength to send him away and pretended not to notice. He disappeared behind me and I waited for the disgusting sounds of his personal hygiene.

  My hands were dangling down beside the chair, as they do when they don’t have a book or a glass to hold. I felt something warm, damp and soft against the fingers of one of them. Hector was licking my hand, tentatively at first as if he feared a rebuff – which was certainly on the cards when you thought of where his tongue had been – and then with greater assurance. It took me back to that morning less than a year ago when the little pink tongue of a helpless puppy had licked the tip of my finger. Now look at him. While he carried on licking my palm, I stroked the top of his nose with my fingers and he made little grunting noises. Arfa came out of the sliding doors onto the terrace with the ouzo.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing!’ I said brightly, wiping the tears off my cheeks with the heel of my free hand.

  Nevertheless, the old Hector grew back with his hair. Soon enough he was the scourge of trousers and chickens again, the bane of ball games and toys. He was an untamed force of nature from the mountains and he made suburban life intolerable. He was to meet his destiny on Evia.

  On my first visit home after the tile expedition with Ajax, Arfa and I had a classic marital row. It was the one in which each side accuses the other of having the easier life: ‘It’s all right for you … you never think of all I have to do … look what I have to put up with … why don’t you stay at home all day and look after the children … why don’t you hump tiles around and haggle with Greeks all day …’ When we had exhausted the predictable stuff, Arfa announced that Hector was the last straw, he was my dog and he was going with me to Evia. Otherwise she would set him free where he belonged on Mount Parnis to fend for himself. I put up token resistance, saying that I had nowhere to keep him, he would antagonise our new neighbours by biting their children and killing their chickens, he would have to stay tied up or locked in the car and so on.

  ‘He goes or I go,’ she said and that was it.

  With a heavy heart and full of premonition about Hector’s fate, I bought a massive chain and a collar you would have thought went out with bear-baiting mastiffs. I tied him in the back of the mini out of reach of the upholstery, but I needn’t have worried about him savaging the seats on the way. He was sick all over them.

  It was like taking him home. At the cemetery he leaped out of the car and stood with his nose in the air, tail quivering. While I mopped out the car, he ran this way and that on the end of his chain, revelling in sights and smells that he had surely been too young to remember when I had found him on the mountain. He dragged me up the path to the house like a bloodhound closing on a fugitive.

  I tied him to the olive tree, which was not a success because he ran round and round it and throttled himself, and then to a massive iron staple cemented into the stone wall of the house just inside the basement door. This was convenient, as I could barricade him inside at night when I finished work.

  There was no question of taking Hector down to the village. I had my pride. I decided to keep him hidden like an undesirable relative in a Victorian novel. It was also for his own safety. Country folk, who live and work with animals, have no compunction about shooting any that prove to be a pest. At ouzo time I shut him in with an old door and left him with a bowl of dog food. I could hear him howling from the cemetery. When I went back the next morning with a bone from Eleni to salve my conscience, he presented me with two dead rats and a half-alive one for me to finish off.

  I had to admit that he was company. As I brushed my old tiles he sat on his haunches beside me, vibrant and alert. He didn’t pull at the leash or whine or yap and I was beginning to feel quite well-disposed towards him. I was so far deluded not to shut him away when sun-touched Dionysos first appeared. I had watched enough Disney with the children to know that this gentle child of nature would have an affinity with animals. I imagined him taming the beast with a glance and a whisper. But as soon as Dionysos crossed the boundary of our property, Hector leaped at him with a savage snarl and he scampered back into the bushes.

  I usually made sure that Hector was firmly barricaded in when stylish Barba Vasilis came by with his sheep. One fateful morning I was so engrossed in my tiles that I didn’t notice him until it was too late. Hector made his usual lunge. The chain brought him up short, pop-eyed and slavering, the bark choked out of him by the massive collar.

  ‘A fine dog,’ said Barba Vasilis.

  It often happens that when you look at familiar things through someone else’s eyes you see them as you have never seen them before. Full of trepidation, you send your child off to tea at another house. When the other mother tells you how polite and charming and helpful your offspring has been, you assume that she has mixed yours up with someone else’s or has very low standards of behaviour. Then perhaps you see your child in a new light. But not this time. To my mind Hector’s appearance and behaviour were as appalling as ever. I could not begin to see what Barba Vasilis saw in him to admire.

  Worse was to come. Wherever Barba Vasilis was, his sheep were not far behind. They appeared scuffling and chomping from behind the chapel just down the hill. When Hector saw them he forgot Barba Vasilis. He was transfixed. Not only his tail but his whole body quivered. He saw chickens and pigeons and trousers and footballs all lumped into one woolly mass of irresistible temptation. He shuffled backwards and half crouched. A noise between a growl and a rumble started somewhere deep in his belly.

  ‘Heck-tor,’ I said in the warning tone I used when one of the children was about to be naughty. It had as much effect. The dog launched himself towards the sheep. I closed my eyes. What a horrible way to go: garrotted or even decapitated by his chain. Fat chance. His throat held. The chain held. The iron staple held. The wall gave way and he was off, dragging a lump of mortar behind him. I ran after. It was like chasing a kite that a child has let go.

  In Britain sheep-worrying is a serious offence against the law and the countryside code. Collies learn to mince round their charges without alarming them. If a slavering dog were to charge at them with a bronze bark, a clanking chain and a thumping lump of rubble, a hysterical person waving his arms and yelling not far behind, they would reasonably take flight and have their bottoms bitten. Greek sheep are made of different stuff. In the mountains ferocious dogs are on their side. They protect them from wolves and rustlers and passers-by.

  Barba Vasilis’s sheep did not liv
e in the mountains, but they had dog sense in their genes. Instead of bolting, they huddled and faced Hector full on. He braked and confronted them. This had never happened to him before. He was not used to being stared down. There was something in his own genes too. It was why he spared the wool flokati rugs at home. He slunk up to the flock, sniffed and lay down with his head on his paws. The sheep went back to their chomping.

  ‘A very fine dog,’ said Barba Vasilis. ‘Do you want to sell him? My brother-in-law has animals on Dirfis. His dogs all have calazar.’

  It was done the next day. Yannis from Dirfis came at the end of the morning. I said I wouldn’t accept payment, which he and Barba Vasilis took as another sign of foreign madness. Hector scrambled into the sheep-smelling pick-up without a backward glance. It was such a relief to get him out of our lives, but at the same time I felt a pang of regret.

  In my daydreams, hiking in the mountains, I am attacked by a pack of wolves. They are about to pounce when ferocious sheepdogs appear and drive them off. The ugliest brute, their leader, lopes up to me and licks my hand …

  Divine intervention

  One evening Spiros the carpenter came up at sunset instead of his daughter Antigone. I hoped I hadn’t caused a scandal by engaging her in conversation. In Victorian times in Britain a lady was ‘compromised’, in other words her reputation ruined, if she was seen unchaperoned in the company of an unrelated man, and so it still was in rural Greece. If so, her father was in no hurry for a confrontation. He fed the chickens, tidied his yard, disappeared inside the house where there was much squawking and fluttering, and took his time over plodding down to the church to light the lamp.

  I worked diligently on my tiles and watched out of the corner of my eye as he pulled the squeaking door shut and came up the path towards me. The slope accentuated the hollow-chested stoop that he had acquired from a lifetime bent over saws and planes. For the same reason, his muscled arms were out of proportion to the rest of his scrawny body. His unhealthy yellow face was deeply crinkled and his breath came fast and shallow. His pride was a thick walrus moustache, which, contrary to local practice, he did not dye black but left to its natural colours, a motley of greys and gingers with yellow nicotine and blue marking pencil and red cough linctus and whatever he had eaten for his last meal, all sprinkled with gold sawdust.